Mubtadiyah

(Arabic) Beginner: One who sees blood for the first time.“And indeed, [appointed] over you are keepers, Noble and recording;They know whatever you do.”—The Holy Quran 82: 10-12

Hidden in a dim stall as the muezzin calledall worshipers to prayer, I touched privatelythe indelible stain. And watched, with a nascent senseof kinship, the women washingthrough the interstice of the door,their veils slipping off like water, waterspotting their clothes like rain.I thought the thought onlychildren and the pious believe, that I was, justlike that, no longera girl: the blood my summons, blot like a seal, a scarlet membershipcard slid from my innermost pocket. I was newly twelve and wiseenough to be frightened. I had read The Book and so understoodmy own was now opening, alightingonto my shoulders like some ethereal bird flappingbriefly immaculatewings, and understood, too, that I myself engenderedthe ink with which, on its pages, my sins would forever bewritten (not literally butthis was how I imagined it, metaphor, as the blood broughtGod’s recorders like sharks to me,menarche a bright flare, a matador’s crimson cape)—I had not been goodall my life but until this first vermillion dripI lived unobserved, my sins not sinsbecause no one looked. And now,above like a lamp suddenlyablaze, God’s reproachfuleye turned my way, a searchlight eternallysearching, and seeing and seeing—I was as good as I would ever be. In the dark, the ruddyiris stared back at me.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian American poet and author of the forthcoming chapbook Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018). The recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, New England Review, Narrative, the Rumpus, and elsewhere.